Italian neo-Fascist party plans rally on 95th anniversary of Mussolini’s March on Rome

Rome, Sep 7 (IANS/AKI) An Italian neo-Fascist party plans to hold a ‘Patriots’ march on Rome next month on the 95th anniversary of the one that in 1922 led to Benito Mussolini’s decades-long dictatorship.

“We call on Patriots to gather together #28 October,” wrote the Forza Nuova party on its Facebook page, adding that the march will protest Italy’s “illegitimate government”.

The rally is also to protest a bill to grant citizenship to children born to migrants and who were educated in Italy, and to deplore “violence and rapes committed by immigrants who have flooded our country”, read the Facebook post.

Forza Nuova, which won 0.26 per cent of the vote in Italy’s national elections in 2013, are also fund-raising on social media for their planned march.

It is not yet clear if Italian officials will give the go-ahead for the rally, which has been slammed by leftwingers as an unacceptable provocation that flouts the Italian Constitution.

The head of Italy’s association of World War II partisans told La Repubblica daily on Wednesday he was “dismayed” by the planned rally, and urged Interior Minister Marco Minniti to ban it.

“The idea that a neo-Fascist party can organise such an event on the anniversary of a tragic event – the march that started the (fascist) regime – is extremely serious and unacceptable,” said Carlo Smuraglia, referring to the entry to Rome by armed fascist militias on October 28, 1922 which led to the resignation of the government and the appointment of Mussolini as Prime Minister by King Victor Emmanuel III.

Mussolini, who took Italy into World War II an ally of Nazi Germany, was deposed in 1943, following the Allied invasion.

Forza Nuova’s leader Roberto Fiore called Tuesday on Facebook for “boxers, football ‘ultras’ and taxi drivers” to join vigilante patrols the party is planning in cities across Italy “against immigrant criminality”.

Forza Nuova hopes to tap into sections of public opinion that have become increasingly receptive to strident anti-migrant rhetoric in Italy, where over 600,000 migrants, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, have landed in the past three years.